Monday, November 25, 2013

Meanwhile, Back In Afghanistan..Here's The Latest

While our eyes are focused on the ObamaCare debacle and the horrendous capitulation in Iran, the war in AfPak goes on, winding down to President Obama's per-ordained end game.

Except now, he wants to change the rules.

Relationships between Afghan President Karzai and the Obama White House could best be described as shaky and not particularly pleasant. At this point, we're essentially reduced to parsing surrender terms for a more or less easy exit, thanks to President Obama's set in stone withdrawal date of 2014, which always meant that all the Taliban had to do was wait us out.

President Obama and his team are trying to achieve two things here. The first is to buy a little peace from the Taliban until we skedaddle, which President Obama recently did by giving Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif another $1.6 billion in 'aid'. Sharif (known in Pakistan as 'Mr. Ten Percent' because of his kleptocrat ways) will pocket some of the swag and give some of it to the Taliban as a sort of exit fee.

The second, goodness knows why, is a security agreement with the Karzai government that would allow a small contingent of 10-15,000 U.S. soldiers to stay in the country after 2014 as a security force, a commitment of around $2 billion per year or so not counting baksheesh to Pakistan for allowing us to resupply them overland via the Pakistani port of Karachi and the Torkhum pass, something which is presently running us about $7 billion or so. And not counting any aid we give to Afghanistan.

The deal as proposed by the U.S. mandates that American troops and personnel will not be subject to what passes for law in Afghanistan, or to any Afghan taxes. The same applies to any U.S. companies doing business there.

Karzai insisted on a letter of apology from the president to the Afghan people 'acknowledging mistakes'. Karzai isn't talking about what was actually in the letter but if you believe Secretary of State John Kerry and the version of the letter the Afghans posted online, there was no apology, merely the outline of the proposed deal and language along the lines of "Many of my countrymen and women have given their lives or been seriously wounded in the pursuit of protecting Afghans, and we honor the enormous sacrifices they have made, side by side with Afghans."

Of course, a number of those Americans who gave their lives were actually murdered, in some cases by the every Afghans they had trained, to the point where joint patrols have been suspended but the ever optimistic Secretary Kerry had this to say about the American role in Afghanistan after 2014:

"It is entirely train, equip and assist. There is no combat role for United States forces, and the bilateral security agreement is a way to try to clarify for Afghans and for United States military forces exactly what the rules are with respect to that ongoing relationship."

Wonderful.

The proposed agreement satisfies Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s demand for an end to controversial raids by explicitly stating that U.S. forces will no longer be allowed to enter Afghan homes, no matter what.

Of course, there's also baksheesh at stake...an additional $8 billion for Afghanistan security forces and what are called 'development projects', AKA nation building. In case you're counting, we're up to a commitment of around $17 billion plus if you also count baksheesh to Pakistan ( $7 billion) and money to deploy 10-15,000 U.S. troops ( between $1.5 and $2 billion). Oh, and let's also add in another $7 billion in equipment the Pentagon says it's going to destroy or just abandon partly because of the terrain and partly because of the fast approaching deadline, because they say it would cost more to ship it out of AfPak than it's worth. In my family, our share of that $7 billion amounts to around $100.

Karzai originally stonewalled, insisting that the proposed agreement should be signed by his successor after elections, scheduled for April 5 of 2014. Then he insisted that the agreement had to be sent to the Loya Jirga, the Afghan council of tribal chiefs and elders, about 2,500 people.

The rationale for our troops staying here is that they're going to train and build up yet another Muslim army financed by the American taxpayers. And our troops going to act as 'advisers' with a combat role in spite of Secretary Kerry's horse manure. We wouldn't need 10-15,000 soldiers there as 'trainers' otherwise and could cut that force by 75% if all they were doing is training a friendly ally.

But the point is that the Afghans aren't our allies, a lot of them don't mind being ruled by the Taliban and they don't care for foreigners at all...although they do like our money.

Someone else who likes our money - the taxpayer's money, that is - are the various well connected companies who are going to get the contracts from the Obama White House to build that Muslim army and for all those nation building 'development' projects.

That's what this is all about, and Hamid Karzhai, along with his brother is already a multimillionaire thanks to our intervention in Afghanistan. He's just holding out for some severance pay. He'll go along with the agreement once he gets it, and will likely be gone as soon as the elections are over.

The ones who will be stuck there are our troops, doomed to try to defend themselves under even more restrictive Rules of Engagement than before, surrounded by enemies open and covert.

But wait, I hear you say. Don't we have to maintain a presence there in order to make sure Afghanistan doesn't become a failed state and a haven of al-Qaeda and other terrorists? Don't we need to train the Afghans to fight the Taliban?

No, I don;t think so. For one thing,there are already plenty of failed states out there that are havens of terrorism. Taken a look at Pakistan lately? Aside from that, al-Qaeda, thanks to President Obama's assassination of Osama bin-Laden and the ascendency of his second and command,ex-Muslim Brotherhood leader Ayman Zawahiri have largely relocated to the Arab world, to places like Libya,Syria and Iraq, among other places. And as I mentioned,there are quite a few Afghans who like the Taliban and their 7th century worldview a lot more than they like ferenghis in their midst.

And of course,there's also this question that no one wants to answer. Why spend billions we don't have to train and equip Muslim armies who are just as likely as not to take those same weapons and use them against us given the chance? Especially when budget cuts are hurting and curtailing our own military?

I think the answer to that question is pretty obvious, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

And as for Afghanistan, it was a bad idea to go there in the first place. One genius of a president decided it was a great idea to send an army and billions in equipment into a landlocked country surrounded by hostile territory.And another genius of a president decided to double down to make up for shooting his mouth off during a presidential campaign about 'the good war'...after letting our enemies know exactly how long they had to wait before we retreated.

It's high time we left, and the sooner the better. And that's particularly true given whom our current commander-in-chief is.

My remark about putting an army and billions of dollars worth of equipment into a land locked country surrounded by hostile territory pretty much summarizes my feelings about the way we proceeded.

An elementary fact of military strategy is that you always make sure you have secure ingress and egress for your supply lines, unless you plan on living off th eland.We didn't do that.

And this is no reflection on the incredible bravery and feats of arms our warriors accomplished there, something I've been writing about for years. Do a search on this site for Operation Mountain Thrust' for a sample.

You kill a rattler by cutting off its head. Neither Saddam or the Pathans were our main enemies, just as al-Qaeda were mere subcontractors of jihad.

Our president should have made it quite clear what we were fighting from the very beginning instead of lying to the American people and telling them we were in a 'War On Terror'.

That would have changed the focus entirely.

It was also monumentally stupid to issue an ultimatum to the Taliban to give up OBL once they had taken him under their protection, a horrendous violation of Pashtunwalli, the moral code of the Afghan Pathans that predates Islam. To them, OBL was a war hero who fought the Soviets with them.Of course they refused.

The president could have fought the war the way FDR did after Pearl Harbor, going to Congress for a declaration of war based on the oft-mouthed Bush Doctrine that anyone harboring, financing or aiding and abetting al-Qaeda or other Islamic fascism was an enemy of the U.S.

He could have secured the borders, re-adapted the original War Powers Act (not the post-Watergate one) arrested or deported anyone who looked talked or smelled like an enemy security risk and given the FBI carte blanche to smoke out any he missed.

And he could have confronted the real countries aiding and abetting Islamic fascism, either diplomatically or otherwise.

That would have been preferable IMO.

And the war would have been over in Bush's first term.

BTW, I was writing this sort of thing as far back as 2001, with very few changes.Instead, we got political correctness, appeasement of Islamism and ill defined goals and strategies that led nowhere.

Even after we got entangled in AfPak, there are things we could have done that would have stabilized the situation at a lot less cost, much less manpower and actually let the Afghans police themselves, rather than us outraging them with raids and drone strikes that killed civilians.

Again, do a search on this site under 'Afghanistan' for more details. Here's a hint..one key to the situation we never even tried involves opium.